


The Waves Beat A Song In Time To Your Heart

by Iron



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Isolation, Moirails, Multi, fear of the ocean, fear of water, grub lost in the culling caves, hemospectrum politics, little!trolls, the Empire is not perfect, wildboy!Eridan, will add to them as they show up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-05
Updated: 2013-09-05
Packaged: 2017-12-25 16:34:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/955341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Iron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are sinking in the water. </p>
<p>You cannot hold your breath anymore, and with a rush of used up bubble you take your final breath.</p>
<p>The white thing flashes closer.</p>
<p>You stop moving. </p>
<p>Something rushes under your legs. You are moving upwards.</p>
<p>Your eyesight has gone dark.</p>
<p>You are afraid.<br/>Alternately-</p>
<p>A young troll lives out his days in relative happiness on his island, never striving to leave it for fear of drowning. His name will be Eridan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waves Beat A Song In Time To Your Heart

===> Be Eridan Ampora

 

But you can’t be Eridan yet, silly! You don’t have a name! There is no one named Eridan, yet, 'cause you are not yet named Eridan. 

 

====> Be the Purple Grub

 

Much better! You are the grub. Your little grub-legs are scritch-scratching as you crawl out of the brooding caves, chirring and chirping quite happily to yourself. These caves are right next to the ocean, and you can smell the salt in the air. 

It makes you excited. You have never smelt salt before, or seen the ocean, or even know what those two things are, but something deep inside tells you that it is right, and you aren’t yet jaded enough to question it yet. So you follow that instinct that tells you to head straight for the salt smell, without heed of your surroundings. You can’t see very well, though you don’t know why. Everything that isn’t right in front of you is really fuzzy. 

Because you don’t know anything else you think it’s normal for everyone. Really, you just have really shitty eyesight. 

Your shitty eyesight is, in fact, the reason the next few moments change the course of the future forever: you keep crawling the salt-smell, crawling and wiggling and squirming, giggling so happily and innocently, until you crawl and giggle right off the fuckin’ cliff. 

This would not have been a problem, if you had already gone through molt. As you are a seadweller, that being the kind of troll who resides in the sea, after molt you would have been graced with a lovely pair of fins, and, more importantly, gills. Quite unfortunately, pre-molt seadweller grubs are just like landdweller grubs, without fin or gill or any thing that might lend you to survive in the waters below. 

You flail in the air as you fall, a squeak pulled from your protein chute. You are afraid; falling is not a new sensation for you, but one you have felt before, and you know that it hurts. 

Then, with a small plop and a cry, you hit the waves below. Immediately, you sink. Like a stone, you fall further and further, tide and weight pulling you down. 

Flailing more, your nubby legs churning the water white, you struggle to reach the surface. What little air that was in your lungs is fading fast. Every move you make sends you sinking further into the dark depths. 

Then there is a flash of white in the corner of your eyes. The sound of something fast moving through the water. You panic. Some instinct tells you that there are predators in these waters, and fear grips you. Terror stills your movements, like they did not before. 

Water, dark and sweet, rushes into your mouth. You choke; after molt, this would have been normal. It is not after molt. What would have been normal, good, then, is only a quicker death for you now. 

You cannot hold your breath anymore, and with a rush of used up bubble you take your final breath. 

The white thing flashes closer. 

You stop moving. 

Something rushes under your legs. You are moving upwards. 

Your eyesight has gone dark. 

You are afraid. 

And then your little head breaks through the waves, and whatever saved you from the depths is pressing softly on your abdomen, until you cough up and vomit the sea from your body. And then you can breath again, can see, and your little, fat grub body is squirming around on the gritty ground. You are crying, you realize, purple tears tracing their way down your face. You are crying and you don’t know why. 

The creature nudges you with its snout, snorting softly. The warm air tickles your cooling body. The tears dry up, slowly, leaving you a sniffling, hiccuping wreck. The creature curls up around you. You are tired. You fall asleep slowly, to the sound of it's breathing, to the warmth around you.

You do not dream.

You do not know this is abnormal. 

 

\--

 

You have just come out of molt. You crawl from your cocoon, slippery-wet nakedness shivering against the warm sand. You have arms and legs, now, and with a sort of stupid fascination you try to stand. 

You do not succeed. Unable to find your balance on two feet, too weak to stand, your useless stick legs crumple beneath you. A huff passes your lips, and tears fill your eyes. Something tells you that anyone else your age would have been able to stand, would already be walking and running around. 

Lusus nudges you to try again, and with his support you climb to your feet. The sand digs into the delicate skin of your feet, sharp shards of rock and shells threatening to slice open the delicate skin. You take one wobbly step, two, leaning heavily onto the bulk of your caretaker. He whinnies, ever supportive, still and cool under your hands. 

You don’t know how to talk. You don’t know how old you are, or the name of the ocean, or if the sounds that leave your mouth should mean anything. Something tells you that someone should be teaching you this, that you should know these things. But your lusus teaches you enough – what kind of thunder means a bad storm, how to get the mussels off rocks, which growl means ‘danger’ and which means ‘annoyed’, what’s poisonous and what’s just plain gross – and that’s enough. Because you don’t know that there’s a way to tell time, and you don’t think the ocean needs a name, and your body speaks louder than words ever could. 

You don’t have a name, don’t even know there are such things, but your lusus has a special sound, one just for you, ‘E-e-e-eryh-dah-ah-ahn-n-n-n’, and it sounds like the waves as they break on the rocks. Sometimes, when your lusus is away hunting, you’ll sit on one of your rocks and just say it to yourself, your special sound, over and over and over. You never get it quite right, though, so when you try it always sounds like ‘E-e-e-rih-dahn-n-nnn’, nothing like how your lusus does. But it’s still your special sound, so no matter how mangled you make it, it still makes you smile. 

You are learning to walk. Your hand is at your lusus’ neck, fingers and palms pressed over cool, dry, slightly bumpy skin, weight pressed against his side. Inside your chest the waves are beating an old song against your rib cage, moving to the pounding of your heart, and you are happy. You are happy. 

You do not know this is abnormal. 

 

= = = = = > Be a little older 

 

You are a little older. 

You have mastered walking, and running, and have full range of your little island. The ship is your home, now, where you sleep and eat, but the beach is still where you play. 

The moons shine bright overhead as you scrabble over black rocks. Your feet and hands have grown tough over the perigees, and the stone no longer cuts into your skin. Your lusus nuzzles your back, following you into the ship. Splinters of dry, salt-pocked wood break off against your skin as you slide through the breach in the hull, your lusus helping you through. 

Your ship is big, four floors including the hold, with a library and a mess hall and even space for an infirmary. Most of it’s boring, either because you don’t know what it is or because you know and you know that it’s boring, like the tubs filled with chunky, dried out green slime and the room that smells really bad, filled with rotted stuff that you think is meant to be a 'kitchen', but are not sure.

The library is your favorite room. Your lusus went out one day and brought you back a bunch of stuff, like a husktop and schoolfeeding lessons on reading and math, and ever since you learned to read, even if you don't understand most of what the books are saying, you’ve loved the library. It has a huge wood desk just like from your stories where you keep your husktop, and a huge overstuffed chair, and books upon books of adventures and histories. Your favorite is the one about how the brave Orphaner Dualscar, and you think it might be a journal, but it might not be, too, sailed the seven seas. 

It’s really sad, but sometimes you like the sad stories more than the happy ones. And it’s only sad sometimes, and sometimes it’s happy, too. 

You like to read. There’s so much more out there than your little island! 

Even if your ship seems huge, you know from your books that it is actually really small and unimportant. You would like to see the rest of the world. 

You know you won’t. You’re afraid of water, of the ocean. You don’t mind wading out to your knees, or ducking under really quickly to do things like soaking your hair, but you won’t swim. You won’t even let your lusus fly you over the deep parts of the water for fear of falling off into the water. Your gills will never taste the water. You will never see your own phosphorescent lights in the dark of the sea, or pick up a conch from the bottom of the ocean, or hear the glubbing sound of other trolls talking under water. 

You still cannot speak. 

You do not know this is abnormal. 

 

= = = = = > Be a lot older

But you can’t! Then you’d miss meeting your best friend ever!

= = = = = > Be a little older

 

That’s better. 

You’re standing in front of the only mirror you own, carefully checking over your appearance. It is gold-framed and huge, cracked down the middle but otherwise perfectly intact, and you have spent the last three hours carefully polishing it. Now, with the help of you lusus, it is hanging in your ship. 

This is not the first time you have seen your reflection, but that was always in the rippling tide pools or the dull, dingy sides of pots, never really clear or anything. Now, in your shiny gold mirror, you finally have the full, clear picture. You’re not sure if you like it. 

You’ve seen pictures of other trolls in your books, and you don’t really look like them. You’re too thin, and slowly you run your hands over your ribs, to the little space where they stick out from the rest of your body. You can count them one by one, and it makes you a little sick inside. All the trolls you saw in your books were strong, and healthy, but you look sick. 

Quickly moving down, you pass your hands over your slightly concave stomach, to the sharp angles of your hipbones. They cut as sharp as knifes, as sharp as the edges of your black rocks. Down thin thighs, over knobby knees, thinner calves, all corded with tight, hard muscle. Nothing like the pictures in your books. 

You carefully examine your hands. The skin is as grey as the rest of your body, except where thick calluses turn them so pale as to almost be white. The squarish palm leads into thin, long fingers, tipped with yellow-orange claws. They’re long and slightly curved, razor sharp because you use them as tools for your chores, black sand and gook stuck under them. Not ugly, really, but not pretty, either. You run them through your hair, snarling when they only move inches from your head. It’s grown to the back of your knees, a mess of tangles and snarls, knots the size of your fist. Sometimes you sit down to brush it, when there’s nothing to do with your night, but after only a few days it gets snarled up again, so you don’t really see the point. But you like it too much to just hack it hack off, so you deal with it. The purple in it is kind of strange, but pretty, so that’s mostly the reason. 

Your forehead is too wide, your eyes too narrow, forever squinting to see farther than a few feet. Your cheekbones are sharp, shards of glass covered by thin purple flushed skin, shadowing hollow cheekbones. The slope of your square jaw ends in a pointed chin, and your nose is blade-thin and too long, your lips plush and black like some noblewoman's from one of your books. Your ear fins flare, delicate purpled skin stretched between grey spines, standing out like fans against your face. 

All together, you look sort of ridiculous. But you can see potential. You know you will be very handsome one day, because that’s what happens. Wrigglers are sort of ugly and ridiculous, and when they reach final molt they become handsome and graceful and pretty. That’s just the way it is.

You do not hate yourself. You do not know this is abnormal. 

 

= = = = = > You didn’t meet your friend. What was the point of this? 

 

Well, it’s not your fault if you went back too far, is it? 

 

= = = = = > You are useless. 

 

You just follow the commands, not give them. It’s not your fault. 

 

= = = = = > Whatever. Meet this friend of yours. 

 

You're sitting on one of the spiky blacks rock at the edge of your beach, feet dangling over the water. At your side is a wicker basket filled with the day's catch, mostly mussels. Your lusus is still out hunting in the ocean, and you know he won't be back until the green moon is just dipping over the horizon. 

The pink moon is just rising on the other side of the sky. You've spent the day dong your inside-chores and your outside-chores were finished ages ago, which freed up the rest of the day to do something you've been meaning to do for ages: brush your hair. Your lusus has been eyeing your sharp stones for days, and you're pretty sure he's thinking about cutting it off soon.

Plus you found this really pretty picture of a lady with twisted up hair in one of your books, and you want to try to copy it. You didn't really know what done up hair was supposed to look like before the picture, so this is really exciting. 

Running the comb though the first inches of hair, you start from the bottom up. Salt water makes your thick hair rough and sticky, but a generous application of fish oil from a jar in the basket worked into the knots helps. You usually eat the oil, but you make more than you can eat for this exact reason. Working through the knots is easy but time consuming, picking them apart with the teeth of your shell comb and rubbing the oil in when that gets too hard. It leaves your hair shiny and greasy, but the salty roughness is smoothed away. 

Combing it out entirely takes until the green moon is directly overhead, but the result is smooth, slicked hair. It falls over the edge of the rock, almost brushing the softly lapping waves, heavy and unmoved by the soft breeze. You tuck you legs under you body, giving yourself a few extra inches above the water so that there's no chance of your newly brushed hair being caught in the swirling eddies. Chewing your lip thoughtfully, you look out over the ocean. You hope this works, because you're not entirely sure that the next time your lusus gets tired of looking at your knotted hair he won't cut it all off himself. 

Separating your hair into three pieces, you pull them over your left shoulder. One over the other, just like you saw in the picture, you very, very carefully twist them together. The strands are uneven, sticking out awkwardly from the whole, and one of the pieces is shorter than the other two, leaving a trailing tail of almost three inches. You tied it with a piece of kelp rope. 

You lay it over your lap, a long black and purple rope that leaves slick marks where it rests on your lap. You used too much oil, and now it won't dry out for ages. 

The pink moon is almost overhead when you decide that you should probably collect some clams, because you can never have enough clams, and maybe some seaweed, to, because seaweed chips are really good and you're running low. You're just about to stand when a noise, like the clack-clack of empty clam shells falling against stone, startles you. You don't fall into the ocean, but only just barely, clinging to your rocky perch by your fingernail. “Hey!” 

“Aaagh!” The scream of your voice is almost drowned by the pounding of your blood pusher, roaring in your auricular sponge clots. One leg is thrown awkwardly over the stone, the other hanging off over the water, claws digging into stone and sediment. You can feel the edges slicing through your callouses, purple blood welling up and slip-sliding between your desperately clenched fingers. 

You are terrified. 

The water laps gently at your toes. 

Something invisible, soft and warm like the sand after a day of baking in the sun, clings to your body, then, and behind your closed eyelids light shines through. Delicately, intimately gently, you are pulled from your precarious grip on the rock. You flail, fighting and digging your claws deeper into the smooth side, until they splinter and rip out of their beds, and all you're left with is bleeding hands. 

You are set down on top of the soft, warm sand of your beach, and you stumble to your feet, scrambling away from the water. Your eyes snap open, you can't remember when you closed them but you did, and there is _nothing there_. 

Your legs tangle together and you trip, your ass hits the sand and then your back and last your head, staring up into the night sky. And then you're staring at the glowing red and blue figure hanging in the sky, arms raise and eyes glowing. Your first reaction is to stand up and _run_. 

Your second, which is thank gog the one you follow, is to sit _very very still_ and hope the fact that you weren't dumped in the water means the figure won't hurt you. 

He doesn't. 

You watched silently as he lands on the sand, and then as the blue and red light flickers out. 

He takes one step towards you, two, stopping just out of range of your claws. You tuck them against your chest instead, and lick absently at the blood where it wells up where your claws were ripped out. “I'm not gonna hurt you.” The creature – another troll, you think, but you're still seeing splotches of color in your eyes from the too-bright light show from before – says. 

The sounds coming out of his mouth don't make any sense to you. 

They don't need to. You can recognize him from your books, pictures drawn and journals written and hidden in the bowels of your ship. In your daydreams you would think of him, imagine him and his adventures, seeing the entire universe. Sometimes, in the afternoon when you can't sleep for fear of nightmares, you daydream of seeing the universe with him. You should have recognized him the moment you saw the red and blue lights. 

He's the Psiioniic. 

You scramble to your feet, but you can't choose between taken a step forward or a step back, whether to be terrified or awed. “Hey, you, what'th your deal? Are you the troll guarding thith peithe of the map?” The stranger, the strange things wrapped around his body flapping in the wind – clothes, but not like anything you've seen in your books, which are impractical and gaudy things, the stranger's black and tight and simple and entirely alien – takes one hesitant step towards you. He is bracing for attack. 

Instinct tells you this; the most you know of fighting you have learned from your lusus, who teaches you of fighting for dominance, for survival, and who's lessons will never truly be enough for beyond your seas and your beaches. 

“Hey, what'th your damage?” The other troll makes his strange noises again, and you disregard them easily. 

Your earlier fear has washed away like pictures in the sand, and you smile at him. In the back of your throat you make your question-sound, a chirrup-purr that you made up all by yourself when you were just a wriggler. The other troll tilts his head, blank eyes staring through you.

“Yeah, that'th not gonna work. Can you not talk? Ith that it? Cauthe thith ith'nt gonna work if I have no idea what you're thaying.” You're standing right in front of him now, naked toes to the hard front of the things he's wearing over his feet. You reach out one shaking hand, breath caught in your throat, and touch the symbol on his chest. The one you can recognize from the books in your library, though you can't really understand what they're saying. You just don't have the frame of reference that most of them require. 

Sometimes it makes you wish you were less sheltered. 

“Hey! No, no touching.” He slaps your hand away, and the breath you'd held comes out in a _whoosh_ of slightly briny air. A disappointed whine rises up, and you hold the limb to your chest. His slap, as light as it was, had broken open your scabbed nail beds and rich purple blood starts to drip over your fingers. You stick them in your mouth and begin to suck, because having blood as well as fish oil all over you is just a little too much. 

You scurry back a few steps, out of hitting range again. Your blood is cool and coppery on your tongue, clashing with the taste of salt and skin into something almost delicious. You are careful to keep them away from the sharp points of your teeth. 

The troll looks guilty, blue-and-red eyes squinting at him through colored glass. “Thit, dude!” he rushed forward, and before you could scramble away pulls your hand from your mouth. Blood and saliva smear across his fingers, and you can't help the instinctual snarl that rips itself from your throat. It _hurts_ , more than it had when the nails had first been ripped from their beds, than they had in your mouth, being held by his unfamiliar fingers. 

And then the fear from before comes back times three, because your excitement had not actually erased your fear but masked it, and the pain has jarred that away. 

You run. The pain and surprise and something else are overwhelming, and you run. 

Your feet push into the sand, over the three yards of black beach and then you scramble up the rocks, fingers and toes finding familiar cracks and crevices, and suddenly you're pulling yourself through the hole in the hull, rotting wood (and, ridiculously, some part of your mind notes that you'll have to replace the floor again so you don't fall through unexpectedly) leaving long, shallow gashes up your arms. They ooze blood sluggishly, but you aren't worried, fear over taking your mind like a drug, numbing the pain. 

The dark familiarity of your home, with its salt-pocked wooden walls and sand-smoothed floors and fish-oil smell, calms you almost immediately. The rope of panic around your neck eases, and then you can breathe, lean against the curved wall of your ship and shiver. Your face is wet, and your breath comes in hitching intakes, and you don't know why you're crying but you are. 

Slowly, you sink down the wall, breath coming in whistles and face wet and then you open your mouth as wide as you can because at the edges of your hole you can see the red-and-blue light and _he is coming_ and you _scream_. 

 

= = = = = > What. No, seriously, what the fuck? 

 

Your friend is kind of an asshole. (You are easily spooked by new trolls, they realize too late, and this isn't the last time your best friend makes you cry)

**Author's Note:**

> I really should update something...
> 
> Any questions? Comments? Flames? Shoot away!


End file.
